After wide scale anti-tourism protests over the summer, Barcelona is trying to turn a negative into a positive by spending some of the money raised from the city’s tax on visitors to tackle issues caused by climate change.
Barcelona is one of the most visited cities in Europe, and for many of Barcelona’s 1.6 million residents, tourism is seen as the reason for a growing number of problems, like a housing shortage, rising prices and changing neighborhoods.
“The urban fabric is completely destroyed,” Barcelona resident Fernando told CBS News. He lives in a neighborhood that is popular among tourists for its restaurants and bars.
“This area particularly, you know, I’ve lived here for over 20 years and it’s just, slowly getting, like, soulless. I would say 50% of the buildings are here just for temporary use, you know, for rentals,” he said.
CBS Saturday Morning
“If it was like interesting cultural artistic and these kinds of clients, that would be much better for everybody,” Barcelona resident Elizabeth, who works at a hotel, told CBS News. “But people who come only for party, drink and just not taking care of the city. That is the problem.”
But Barcelona is among a number of southern European cities facing another problem: the increasingly extreme effects of climate change. In recent years, it has become dryer and warmer, and there have been intense and dangerous heat waves and draughts.
The rising temperatures have become a problem for city infrastructure like public schools, many of which do not have air conditioning, as the extreme heat of summer extends into the school year.
At one Barcelona public school, 11-year-old student Mia told CBS News that she struggles to concentrate when it’s hot.
“It’s very hard,” she said.
Her classmate Theo agreed.
“Sometimes when you’re like, in the class, and you just came out playing football, it’s very hot,” Theo said.
But this year, for the first time, Mia and Theo have air conditioning in school, after a system was installed over the summer. It was paid for using money raised from Barcelona’s tourist tax — a small fee charged to visitors.
“The tourist tax is what the tourists that visit our city pay when they are in a hotel or in a touristic apartment,” Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor Laia Bonet told CBS News. “The possibility of using these revenues, the tourism tax, for such a project is very important so that we can accept tourism in our city and the role that tourism has.”
Barcelona’s City Hall has launched a program to install energy efficient heat pumps and solar panels in all of the city’s 170 public schools over six years. The aim is to provide air conditioning while also decarbonizing by replacing old, gas-powered heating systems. It is investing the equivalent of around $100 million in the project, all of which it says, is coming from the tourist tax.
“I think it’s the best way to link tourism to… the necessary fight against climate change,” Bonet said, adding that the tourist tax funding for the program is “a very important help.”
“It makes the difference,” Bonet said.
But anti-tourism activist Agnes Rodriguez says in using money raised from tourists, the city is missing the point.
“The government should be doing this without depending on tourism … it’s public health,” Rodriguez told CBS News. “If you’re coming to Barcelona tonight, to Chicago or to New York, and you’re staying in a tourist apartment where a family should be living, you are part of this city changing. You’re affecting the life of people living there.”
Rodriguez says that Barcelona residents, not tourists, should be at the center of the city’s fight against climate change.
“We are not a theme park. We are not Disney World. So we want to keep on being a city and being able to live here,” she said.
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